The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

This legislative ennui about musket- and rifle-toting insurgents also ignored that, from Shays’s Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion, white men were the ones who had taken up arms against the United States of America. And in a pattern that would repeat itself well into the twenty-first century, there were little to no consequences for that.

Thus, in the Bill of Rights, emerged an amendment rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them their rights, to keep them from tasting liberty. The Second became the Faustian bargain made to weaken Anti-Federalists’ and Southern opposition to the Constitution. That is why the current-day veneration of the Second Amendment, driven by the lobbying and publicity campaign of the NRA, is, frankly, akin to holding the three-fifths clause sacrosanct.24 They both were designed to deny African Americans’ humanity and rights while carrying the aura of constitutional legitimacy. They both damaged American democracy and called into question the basic founding principles of equality. The Second is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use.